Please join the Physics & Astronomy Department and the Society of Physics Students for final Seminar Speaker Series event of the academic year!

Observing the Universe with Gravitational Waves withErik Katsavounidis, Senior Research Scientist at MIT

Snacks at 4:30 pm, talk begins at 4:45 pm.

Almost 10 years since the first direction of gravitational waves from a pair of merging black holes, about two hundred more gravitational-wave sources have been identified by the ground interferometers LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA, offering an unprecedented dataset for studying strong gravity and what drives the transient sky. An equally breakthrough detection of a pair of merging neutron stars has also established gravitational waves as a driver for multi-messenger astrophysics, also offering a glimpse of what is to follow when such observations become a routine. In this talk, Erik will review how gravitational waves have revolutionized the way we observe our universe, what we have learned so far and what the future may bring.

Erik Katsavounidis is a senior research scientist at MIT. He received his PhD from Caltech in 1995 in high energy physics. Following his degree at Caltech he took a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Italy and later a research scientist position with high energy physics at Caltech. He moved to MIT in 2001 where he set up the gravitational-wave data analysis group and more recently the machine learning for gravitational wave effort; he has been at MIT since then.